I recently listened to a talk by Google's Justin McCarthy (formerly with doubleclick). He discussed a number of Google's real estate related initiatives, including the use of adwords on their maps and Google Base. He did not discuss the items (an everlasting user cookie, gmail vis a vis mining email data and their data policies) referenced in Poulsen's article below:
It's a good policy for dealing with censorship. But, sadly, Google takes the opposite approach on the equally-important issue of user privacy.The company collects and retains forever an enormous amount of information from the public, including a record of every search query a Google user has ever run. If the user is also signed up with Gmail, the company can pull those search results by name. If not, Google can still get them by IP address, or look them up through the everlasting cookie it installs on every user's PC.
And now the company is even offering to store users' word processing documents and spreadsheets.
That's an obvious and tempting target for lawyers in civil litigation, and for law enforcement agencies on fishing expeditions, who might easily subpoena Google for a list of everyone who searched on, for example, "Iraqi war protest," then issue a demand for all of the other searches those users ran.
We don't know whether that's happening or not, because Google has an official policy of not commenting on subpoenas or other legal processes. When the Justice Department sought an extensive list of anonymized search queries from the company, we only learned about it because Google fought the request in open court, out of reluctance to part with a trove of valuable data for free.